Five-year-old helps pay for schoolmate’s milk and then starts a campaign that raises thousands

Sunshine Oelfke is a five-year-old Michigan girl attending kindergarten. At the beginning of October, according to CBS News, her grandmother noticed Sunshine empty her piggy bank on the floor and begin “counting” her money. While this was nothing surprising—kids will count things like that from time to time—Sunshine’s grandmother decided to ask her what she was doing when she saw her putting that money into plastic baggies and into her school backpack.

“What are you doing with that money?” Oelfke asked her granddaughter.

“I’m taking it to school,” Sunshine replied.

The little girl finally spilled the real reason why she needed the money.

“I’m going to take it for milk money. I’m taking it for my friend Layla,” she explained. “She doesn’t get milk — her mom doesn’t have milk money and I do.”

Jackie Oelfke posted about this to her Facebook page.

This event led Jackie to help Sunshine start a GoFundMe page that has, of this diary’s publishing, reacher almost $8,500—well past the original $700 they had hoped to raise to pay for a semester’s worth of milk for her class. Sunshine’s plan was to make sure that every kid in class had milk during snack time.

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According to Jackie Oelfke, Sunshine’s mother has substance abuse issues and has been in and out of the justice system, and Oelfke tries very hard to support her granddaughter. So far, Sunshine seems like she’s growing up with a kindness we can all use.